I don’t believe in ghosts, but when you know someone real well, it’s as if part of them lives on in your mind, like a little semi-autonomous subroutine, just to answer questions like that. I could hear Terri Ann saying, as clearly as if she were standing next to me, “Let’s go for it.”
“Grandpa.” Ellie had to shout over the spanking waves and the engine noise as the exhaust occasionally rose out of the water when the nose of the boat went down. We were all having to hold on a little tighter. “Can Kate stay with us, please?”
“We’ll see, Ellie. Kate, I like you. I like you a lot. But we’ve got a lot more to talk about and work out before we do anything foolish.”
She nodded seriously.
“Some of it could be easier.”
She nodded.
“We could kinda feel our way through the rest of the summer, figure out if it’s what we really want…”
“Yippeee!” Ellie yelled, about that or the big wave we just went crashing over, I wasn’t really sure. Kate grabbed my hand and squeezed so hard I figured that she probably could help out in the shop.
“Excuse me,” Frog announced in a surprisingly loud voice. It was sitting on the dashboard, hanging on to the center windshield brace with both of its little hands. “We are approaching a funnel cloud formation.”
We looked up and there it was, underlit in the reds and oranges of the setting Sun, probing down our side of what was probably Sloan Point.
“Ellie, let me take over. Go in the cabin and put anything loose away and lock the latches.” I tried to gauge the drift of the cloud. North, and maybe a bit east. I swung us over toward the west shore and poured on the gas. The boat leaped forward in a leaping rolling motion as it struck the storm waves at an oblique angle. I edged the heading back south after we rolled almost ninety degrees.
Hanging on tight to a dock cleat, Kate dug out the life preservers, which were right where I’d told the sheriff they were. A squall hit us, wind whipping up to forty knots, I suspected, and my skin stung with hailstones. I couldn’t see Kate four feet away from me, and my heart almost stopped. Then things cleared up a bit and she was pushing a life jacket into my hands. She steered while I put one arm through at a time, holding myself down with the other. When I was set, she opened the cabin door, and timing a roll just right, slipped in to give one to Ellie.
Boat sense speaks well of a woman.
I got a glimpse of the cabin layout as she went. Bed-benches in a V shape running forward into the bow under the foredeck, a tiny closet of a head midships left of the door, to the aft deck across from an equally tiny galley. The floor was now about an inch deep in water. Ellie had a floorboard up and was bailing the bilge water into the six-inch galley sink. She had a gash on her head that she was ignoring. I looked for a bail pump switch, cursing myself for not checking it out better. It had one, and a little tinny buzz added itself to the rest of the racket.
We rolled up in a trough that must have been fifteen feet high, and for a sickening moment the lake looked like it was above me. Then we rolled back. I was too damn scared to get sick. By rights, we ought to be swimming for our lives right now.
On the crest, I could see the funnel cloud bearing down on us, just barely visible in the ruddy twilight. I think it touched the lake momentarily, throwing tons of water skyward, then shrunk back.
A downpour drenched me and the boat wallowed, far too heavy now. The engine vanished momentarily as a wave seemed to roll over us, coughed, and caught again, as the crest lifted us up and out, sending water streaming over the transom. The prop and exhaust screamed in open air and we lost momentum. Then the stern crashed down again and we leapt forward.
The rain let up a bit, but the wind turned ferocious. If we hadn’t taken on so much water, I’d have expected that gust would have capsized us. Tornado or not, I turned directly into the wind and waves, barely making headway, south.
The funnel cloud did a ponderous dance off my port beam, between me and the band of gray over the east shore, a black thumb sticking out of glowing clouds down to the lake. It was, I thought, I hoped, going by us. After a heart-stopping minute it did.
The wind backed off, to maybe thirty knots, from the north now. We surged forward as it caught us, and I eased off the throttle. The door opened, and Kate was by my side again.
“We’ve got flotation tanks in the bow and on both sides,” she screamed. “It’s supposed to be un-sinkable.”
“Thanks,” I yelled back. Now I knew why we weren’t swimming. “Frog, are there any more of those ahead of us?”
“No. In fact, it appears only partly cloudy behind the front. Not unpleasant, really.”
Behind the front, it was cool, maybe seventy as opposed to ninety, and I felt cold from the wind chill. We straightened out, and I started looking for the buoy off Sloan point, signifying the entrance to Steamboat Bay. I caught the strobe, eased to the right and backed off the throttle, managing to combine wind and thrust to head us toward it. We weren’t going to make it.
“Kate!” I yelled. “Can you pull the engine up by yourself?”
She looked a question, then grasped the situation, shouted “Yes!” and headed back to the transom.
I got as far west as I could, then cut the throttle as we brushed by the first reeds. “Now,” I yelled.
She struggled a bit, then rotated the prop up and out of the water. We crabbed sideways in the breakers, rose up, grounded on the bar, rose up on the next wave, grounded again, then floated gently in the lee of the bar into the bay. Despite the weather, the bay was starting to fill with running lights.
I pushed off the bar with the boat hook and Kate dropped the engine. In a minor miracle, it started. I got the running lights on again, gained headway, then put the stern to the wind and shifted to neutral as we drifted by the old Hunter Mansion. Did the family still own it, I wondered? I’d visited once as a kid and it was like going back to the previous century, servants, cooks, and everything.
“Ellie,” I called. “Want to trade for a bit? You steer and I’ll bail.”
She staggered up to the steps, but Kate stopped her and handed her her shirt.
“Lot’s of strange people around, Ellie,” she said. “Besides, it’s chilly now.”
Ellie gave a judicious nod, shrugged into the shirt, and climbed up to take the wheel. I slipped and sat down hard on the bunk bench opposite the little galley. I was exhausted.
“Me, too,” Kate sighed and bent down to continue bailing. I grabbed the pail. We had the interior waterline below the floorboards in another ten minutes; the pump could take care of the rest.
Done, she got out of her wet stuff, toweled off, snapped her net thing around her top, shrugged into a sweatshirt, and a dry bikini bottom all while grinning at me with the confidence of a bridge player that knew the only way to make the contract was to assume the unseen cards were in the right place. The last person that took me for granted like that paid for it with thirty years of marriage.
“Grandpa! Fireworks!” Ellie called. I heard a distant thump and a couple of bangs.
“I’ll be right up. See if Frog can point you toward his spaceship.”
“OK”
“I’d suggest a slight turn toward the left,” Frog told her. Then, “There, that should do nicely.”
“Karl,” Kate asked, “are you worried about a May-December thing? I’m not. I can handle it.”
“Uh, let’s not get ahead of things. Room, board, and work in the shop. If, and I say, if, things really develop in that direction, it might be a good idea if we take a trip to Ely, maybe in October after the first freeze, if things work out that long.”